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Alina Chan Profile picture
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16 Dec, 9 tweets, 4 min read
Some journalists are waving the discovery of close virus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos as evidence the virus is natural.

But the lead author of that paper actually said he thinks it's possible the virus was genetically altered in a lab. h/t @gdemaneuf
www-huffingtonpost-fr.translate.goog/entry/origines… Image
And he's in great company! Several top virologists have expressed that a genetically engineered origin of SARS-CoV-2 is plausible and should be investigated.
We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had access to bat pathogen samples in Laos, from the emails and research reports FOIA'ed and from their very own data deposited in NCBI.
It's not magic. It's literally doing a quick search on a public database.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=…
Covered by @rowanjacobsen @Newsweek

"EcoHealth told Newsweek that it did not directly undertake or fund any of the sampling in Laos. "Any samples or results from Laos are based on WIV's work, funded through other mechanisms," says a company spokesman."

newsweek.com/how-dr-fauci-o…
"for years, a large number of bat samples from the region that harbors viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were sent to the WIV. In other words, EcoHealth's team was in the right place at the right time to have found things very close to SARS-CoV-2 and to have sent them to Wuhan."
"Because there's a lag of several years between when samples are collected and when experiments involving those viruses are published, the most recent papers from EcoHealth and the WIV date to 2015.. viruses found between 2016 and 2019 are known only to the two organizations"
The fact that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were sampling animals in Laos for SARS-like viruses and other pathogens is known.
Fact: scientists were sending pathogen samples from Laos up to Wuhan in the years preceding the pandemic.

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More from @Ayjchan

Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Dec
An addendum to the Proximal Origin letter published in @NatureMedicine is long overdue. I still see people citing this paper with little awareness of how this letter came to be and problems with both its origin and content.
nature.com/articles/s4159…
The addendum should clearly explain and address the following 3 issues:

1. Proximal Origin was the product of a private meeting in Feb 2020 among Western leaders in research/funding. Phone call Feb 1. First draft of Proximal Origin Feb 4.

Experts who provided (redacted) feedback on the manuscript were not acknowledged in the @NatureMedicine letter. The only expert thanked for contributing to discussions is M. Farzan.

Read 26 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
18 Dec
To expand on a point in my recent @StatedClearly interview:

"Science cannot be embodied by one person or even a group of people... It’s not something where a pandemic happens and only virologists can have the answer."

A prime example is #COVIDisAirborne science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
@StatedClearly That SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air is perhaps one of the top 3 most important facts that needed & still needs to be acknowledged to limit covid spread.

It would've saved potentially millions of lives if this simple fact had been clearly explained to the world in early 2020.
Yet, it took until August 2021, more than a year and a half post-covid for a review on this topic to be published in a prominent scientific journal.

Of the 7 authors, only 1 is a virologist. The majority are aerosol or bioengineering experts.
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Read 12 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
17 Dec
A strawman argument from natural #OriginOfCovid proponents is that scientists would've engineered a textbook cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab.

But, if you read their research proposal, the scientists said they would engineer in rare, novel cleavage sites.
The scientists had a pipeline in early 2018 for detecting never-seen-before cleavage sites in rare SARSrCoVs & engineering these into SARSrCoVs in the lab.

There's no reason why novel cleavage sites should look like the ones in our textbooks.
The purpose of their work was to understand the biology of novel cleavage sites observed in rare SARS-like viruses they had encountered.

The purpose was not to engineer in the most textbook version of cleavage sites into their SARS-like viruses.

Read 5 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Dec
Lots of buzz about the new preprint about rare furin cleavage sites in the spikes of European bat SARS-like viruses. Difficult to say much until the spike sequences obtained within this study are deposited in GenBank and released.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Image
It is likely that scientists on the other side of the world had encountered similar rare furin cleavage sites in the SARS-like viruses they had found, which led them to write the following in the 2018 DEFUSE proposal:
"We will also review deep sequence data for low abundant high risk SARSr-CoV that encode functional proteolytic cleavage sites, and if so, introduce these changes into the appropriate high abundant, low risk parental strain."
Read 11 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
16 Dec
I see that the media has started to do its telephone-game thing of slowly exaggerating reality with each successive report.

I did not say that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered. I said that it is reasonable to hypothesize and investigate if it was genetically engineered.
I've even seen some media reporting that I've found evidence of a lab #OriginOfCovid

This is similar to what happened when @MichaelWorobey published his @ScienceMagazine letter, which became reported as a US scientist finding evidence of patient zero at the seafood market.
The context of my statement has not been reported. The @CommonsSTC asked its witnesses to provide a % likelihood estimate for natural vs lab #OriginOfCovid

Richard Horton went first and said he favored the @WHO view that lab origin is extremely unlikely.
Read 9 tweets
Alina Chan Profile picture
15 Dec
Why I lean towards a lab #OriginOfCovid

1. The bulk of circumstantial evidence points towards an accidental research-related emergence of SARS2 in Wuhan.

2. A natural origin has been investigated more thoroughly than a lab origin, yet no dispositive evidence has been found.
Personally, I struggled with whether a lab origin was more likely or not for most of 2020 and 2021.

What changed things for me was the DEFUSE EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan Institute of Virology et al. proposal that leaked in Sep 2021.
I don't know if the US Intelligence Community had access to this research proposal when they made their August 2021 assessment on the #OriginOfCovid

If they were not aware of the DEFUSE proposal, I highly recommend re-doing the assessment.
Read 8 tweets

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